I have an HTC Evo running Android 2.2 (Froyo). I absolutely love the thing. The only downside is the short battery life. One really cool feature it has is the WiFi HotSpot utility, which lets you turn the phone into a WiFi access point, sharing the 3G or 4G internet connection to the wifi. It turns out that the Evo has a really good WiFi antenna in it, too. It has better range as an access point than my Linksys WRT54G at home (even without the fancy antennas sticking out of the back). This really comes in handy when I’m at my parents’ house up north in the boonies, where there is no broadband internet available, and the cell coverage is spotty at best. I have to wander the house in search of a spot that manages to maintain a signal long enough to do anything useful with it. Gone are the days of trying to hold your laptop in some weird spot for the data card to get enough signal. Now once I find a spot where the phone can keep a signal, I can just leave the phone there, and go wherever I want with the laptop to sit in comfort and use it via the WiFi hotspot.

Now, being that I’m out in the boonies, even the best spot in the house to leave the phone at still has a spotty connection that comes and goes. Staying somewhere within visual range of the phone so I can watch the signal strength display (and going and waking the phone back up when it puts the screen to sleep) is a pain. I’d love it if there was an app I could run which would serve up the current phone signal strength and data status over http on the phone’s internal wifi interface (even if it’s on some random port, since you can’t use port 80 without rooting the phone). For the variety of stuff that’s in the marketplace, it would surprise me if such a thing didn’t already exist. But it’s also hard enough to describe that any keywords I can think of to search with give me several dozen unrelated hits. So, Lazyweb, anyone know of such a thing?

With wifi, this is totally a good idea, but most carriers block mobile devices from acting as a server. No inbound connections are allowed. I tried doing something very similar and it turns out you just can’t make it work over edge/3g.

Wifi is what I’m talking about. When the phone is acting as a wifi hotspot, I want to be able to hit the inside interface on the wifi side to see what the mobile radio status is. I installed iJetty and that works fine as a webserver, but haven’t managed to find the right app to put on it to monitor that sort of thing.